Optimization of Water Tanking

Abstract

The drinking water tank of short-haul aircraft is refilled during every stop at the hub airport. This is not necessary and refilling the tank less often can lead to a personnel costs reduction. We implement two Tabu search algorithms to determine a rule specifying during which stops not to refill. The rule minimizes the frequency of refilling while keeping the probability of water shortage sufficiently low. Our algorithms require the probability distribution of water consumption. We suggest a maximum likelihood procedure to estimate this distribution. When used in practice, the refilling rule leads to a decrease in the frequency of water refilling of up to 45%.